Tuesday, March 16, 2010

First off, isn't "Porn for Women" really old? Yes. It is. It was published on April 5th, 2007. That may not seem so old now (except actually it's almost 3 years ago so really it does), but put it this way: when this book came out, the xkcd had only 224 comics. I don't know why Randall has suddenly found reason to be offended by this book now, I guess he just heard of it for the first time? Well, ok. No reason you can't protest after the fact, right, sort of a theoretical kind of thing. Just makes it hard to sympathize with the outraged characters, you know, because it's like, well there's dozens of these books now, why are you only just finding out about it?

Here's the problem I have with so much of this "getting offended by things." This book series, it is a joke. Ok, it plays off a stereotype, I guess. The stereotype is....men don't like doing housework and so women like to see men to housework. This stereotype - which is, as you know, currently tearing the fabric of our nation to shreds - is terrible. So anything that plays into it - a certain book, you see - is a terrible sexist monster that has to be mocked forever. Randall's female persona in the comic is striking a blow for women's equality everywhere by pointing out that she too enjoys actual pornography - a product not usually associated with treating women particularly well, or as people rather than objects. Somehow this is supposed to help the feminist cause.

I know there are some people out there who think that this comic is supposed to make the girl in it look dumb, because she doesn't understand that the book is a joke. The excuses are nice, but the fact is that clearly Randall Munroe doesn't understand that the book is a joke. Apparently the word "porn" can ONLY mean actual pornography. Apparently some people do not realize that there are phrases like "torture porn" which use the word as a metaphor. No one is pretending or arguing that Porn for Women is actual pornography; there are legal definitions for that and we know that they are not met. Does the book exaggerate for comic effect? Yes. But so what? How is that such a terrible thing?

I'm not going to go so far as to say that Randall made this comic to try to impress so called progressive women (that is what I have Rob for). But I do think that this fits into a pattern of "comics which portray the artist as highly sympathetic to women," the most obvious other example being the fact that we have seen like 18 guy-on-girl oral sexes but 0 girl-on-guy (and no gay ones! get offended by that, guys!). What does that mean? I do not want to speculate.

oh of course I want to speculate! This comic is designed to make women who think they are intelligent like Randall, because he is portraying himself as a woman who is offended by all the "right" things. The glorious irony is, that by setting himself up as a heroic defender of women's rights he is basically doing exactly what the guys do in....Porn for Women.

===============

GUYS!Perhaps you know this already but: there is a new Perry Bible Fellowship comic! Well- there is basically a new Perry Bible Fellowship comic. Nick Gurewitch made a very PBFlike comic for some new comic book about superheroes or something. Anyway, here it is. I don't find it all that funny, but like the best PBFs, I love looking at it just the same - the art is just so great, the faces so expressive. The colors and art style just feels like an old movie in the best way.

The associated interview is well worth a read - good stuff about pacing that lesser writers could stand to study. Also, I know little to nothing about superheroes, but even I can tell that the Galactacus/Magneto idea for a comic at the end of the interview is awesome. so stop reading this and start reading that!

91 comments:

The sad thing is, if Porn for Women wasn't a comedy but something serious (presumably evoking firefighter's calendars, but with more vacuum cleaners and feather dusters), it would have actually been funny.

Actually, today's comic isn't a graph joke--it's just a series of graphs. At best, it's a series of graphs with mildly amusing content. It's not even close to a graph joke, which would I suppose be using graphs to tell a joke, or perhaps a joke about graphs, or some such thing.

Do we have a category for "Randall reports the results of his cursory 'amusing' Google searches"?

If three years seems "really old" to you then you have to be a lot younger than even I expected. I was betting on 22. So you're ...what?...16?

Wait until you get to be 30. Three years will hardly be noticed but be sure to never ever read a book that was published a couple of years prior. No! You will only read books in the same year as they are published or not at all, eh?

Randall played his cards well, though. The xkcd forums were (and still are) locked in a flame war over gender equality, traditional gender roles, and, of course, male rape because half the xkcd audience are bitter boys who shun women for not liking them and the other half are randall-esque white knights who pander non-stop to women in an attempt to, if you will, FUCK ONE of them. [citation needed]

I'm not saying that this comic isn't stupid--'cause it is--or that it it's funny--'cause it isn't--and I'm not saying that Randall is actually doing anything helpful about it--'cause he isn't--and I'm not saying that the "Porn for Women" book(s) are horrible--because I basically have little to no idea what they actually are or what their intent is--but the sorts of stereotypes you casually shrug off aren't just benign little things that don't deserve scorn. They actively mess up the childhood and development of a lot of kids, and that's not cool--no matter what XKCD has to say on the subject.

But Porn For Women is making fun of those stereotypes. The fact that they aren't necessarily true, or true in that context or to that extent or whatever, is the joke. It's irony.And I am not a boob you tit. Although it did take me several tries to parse your comment, even though it wasn't unclear, it's 4 AM and, while I can't remember any drug use, I also can't feel my legs, and my eyeballs feel like soapstone.

You realise the fact that Porn for Women is a joke has no baring on the fact it perpetuates sexist stereotypes...? It has no baring on whether you can criticise it for employing and perpetuating those stereotypes... Considering that it doesn't have a baring on those things... the assertion that Randall doesn't realise that Porn for Women is supposed to be funny is pretty baseless.

I am really disappointed in you guys for this one. I identified the possibility that xkcdsucks could really be stupid when it comes to this one but I thought it would be alright because you guys are pretty smart. Unfortunately it seems I turned out poorly.

I'm not sure if that is because of genuine feelings or because of the impetus to tear down the comic. In either case it isn't pretty.

It is making fun of those stereotypes. Not making fun of women via those stereotypes and then saying "but it's ok it's humour."Now, to illustrate the difference, let me replace "joke" with "serious deadpan remark". One is "racists suck". The other is "black people suck." One of those things should probably not be offensive.And hey, even if you don't think it's equivocal at all, I can still say that, if you recognize the first distinction I made, then you have to admit Randall's effectively taking a similar stance that is at least equally offensive.

I thought that the latest one (graphs) had some promise, but Randall - as usual - threw the opportunity away. This is actually the first time since you guys started screaming about it that I took notice of the awful artwork. It's just plain sloppy. And the punchline, of course, is nonexistent.

The porn one was pretty bad too, mostly because it was just a rant, no joke.

"You realise the fact that Porn for Women is a joke has no baring on the fact it perpetuates sexist stereotypes...? It has no baring on whether you can criticise it for employing and perpetuating those stereotypes..."

I disagree. It DOES have baring on these "facts." If I say, in a way clearly meant as sarcastic, "yeah, all women are idiots" then it clearly means that I *don'* believe that all women are idiots. If someone were to come back and seriously say "but all women are not idiots" I would probably call them an idiot.

So the question is... is it obvious that "Porn For Women" is a joke? It would appear that it is, which makes Randall's outrage ridiculous.

The fact that Randall doesn't seem to realize that it's a joke does have relevance. If you read the comic, it's framed as a letter to the writers of the book, when the writers of the book obviously know that women would like to see sex in their pornography. Also, nobody in the world legitimately believes that the average woman would actually masturbate to men doing mundane household chores, which is the joke of the book. That makes this a completely pointless comic, and outside of stating what everybody knows, it doesn't make a point about perpetuating stereotypes, and it doesn't say anything to somebody buying the book, like, hey, if you buy this book, even though it's a joke, you're perpetuating gender stereotypes, and that's bad for everybody.

It fails at making a point and it fails at humor, too, because the last line, the deadpan "People fuck," would only be humorous if the intended recipient of the letter, or the people buying the books, seriously believed that women would not like to see fucking in their porn. Don't get me wrong, I'm pretty sure Randall does get that Porn For Women is a joke, because you'd have to be really thick not to, but the way he wrote this comic is terrible and doesn't get that across. I kind of get what he was going for, but it was just written, set up, and drawn too terribly for it to make sense or get any point across.

"Porn for Women". I love the scent of satire in the morning. The Cambridge Women's Pornography Cooperative's pink and precious stuff may not be good satire, but satire it is. Sort of like Objective Ministries.

Ah! Forgot to add that XKCD is more often than not insufferable, and this recent comic is an outstanding example of why. I'm not convinced that Munroe "got" the joke. As for comics, give me Nicholas Gurewitch's Perry Bible Fellowship or Tim Kredier's The Pain - When Will It End? any day of the week.

You could argue that Porn For Women is harmful because it does reinforce stereotypes, even if it does so with irony (similar to complaints about Sarah Silverman/Jimmy Carr/whoever). It's not something I'd argue, but I wouldn't argue against it either. Besides, clearly there are people who don't get the joke.

However, the "in my porn, people fuck" line just makes me think "...and?". It feels like I'm supposed to punch the air in celebration because a man agreed with something I've been doing for years.

And that makes the comic fucking hilarious, because how sexist is that?

(I think Randall avoids male oral sex in general because they are stick figures. It's easy to draw a man's head between a woman's legs and imply sex. Not so easy to show penii or the lack on a stick figure.)

-

I wish the graphs weren't so messy. I know, it's his style, but it doesn't help when I'm trying to interpret some of these.

The bra size graph makes sense because those with E and A cup sizes are more likely to be expressing frustration about how they can't find the right size bra, or the hassles they have (backaches and pain in the arse men). This leads to other discussions about larger/smaller bra size, particularly with blogs. Whereas C-cup is the most common bra sizing, so people talk about it less.

(I'm sure Randall thinks it's akin to men lying about their penis size, though, otherwise he wouldn't have thought of it or positioned it opposite to the penis size one.)

AGREED: The comic is not funny. He's basically just gone "Here, this is the joke that Porn for Women made. Look at it." Which is twenty different kinds of lame. This comic is so clueless it's slightly embarrassing to read.

DISAGREED: The idea that its release date makes /any difference whatsoever/. Just because it's not a brand new thing doesn't make all jokes null and void, that's just fucking mental. Your entire first paragraph is just a big ol' cloud of nothing.

If that is a feminist blog then it is apparently a really shitty one. I realize there's a lot of different flavors of feminism out there, but I can't see many of them thinking porn is awesome, because it promotes viewing women as objects instead of people. And I am pretty sure most feminists are against women being viewed as objects. Something about females being treated like property rather than human beings throughout history, man I don't know I think I saw it in a book once.

And apparently the commentors on that site are just as dumb as Randall himself and most of the forumers because they apparently don't get it's a joke too? Or some of them get the joke but say that it perpetuates stereotypes or some nonsense.

I look forward to their ranting and raving against Looney Toons for perpetuating the belief that holding a stick of dynamite will not blow a person to pieces but will, in fact, simply turn their face and hair black, or that being shot repeatedly with a firearm will cause no harm except when you drink water and it pours out of the holes like a sprinkler. Those cartoons are brainwashing and destroying our children! Won't someone PLEASE think of the children?!

EDIT: Because I caught anon's post above mine when I previewed...

You could argue that Porn For Women is harmful because it does reinforce stereotypes, even if it does so with irony (similar to complaints about Sarah Silverman/Jimmy Carr/whoever).

I would only argue that if I thought that the book series reinforced harmful stereotypes. Basically this is on a different level than say, "Black people like fried chicken and watermelon" or "Jews are really tight with money" jokes.

If anything, the book is a kind of subtle criticism of men more than a portrayal of female stereotypes. The book is saying "Women like to fantasize about men doing housework, because men don't really do housework that often and women wish they would actually help around the house like they should be doing."

Calling it "Porn for Women" is just a joke title, it'd be like releasing a book of circuit diagrams and calling it "Porn for Electrical Engineers" or something. Nobody is honestly going to look at these books and think that women or electrical engineers masturbate to these things, unless they're a complete moron (lesterroquefort made the same observation earlier).

Congrats, lesterroquefort, you helped my misanthropy coefficient get a little higher this morning...

Now, on today's comic... huh, look, those are graphs. And they have silly veiled jokes in them. Now, for a little bit of rage, today's topic is: how shoddy can Randall be with his graphs?

Because this ones are SHODDY.

I mean, just look at them quickly. The letters are poorly drawn and there is no such thing as straight line in any of them. And now, for something extra "silly", Randall shows again he doesn't know how to make graphs properly, and only do them because it's "cute and funny".

Look at the last. Look at the 147 point. Trace a straigh line down. Now, answer me: is there any good reason why that point, which represents the number of occurrences of "My IQ is 147", is TO THE RIGHT of the 150 point? 147 is smaller than 150, it doesn't make sense!

I wonder why his "nerd" and "intelligent" fanbase still respect him...

@Anon 5:39 AM:It's one thing to constantly feature cunnilingus because it's easier to draw; it's another to register http://cu.nniling.us/

@Anon 5:50 AM:Randall is really shoddy with his graphs, as Professional Mole said. For example:"I have a nine inch penis" has 21,500 results. "I have a 9 inch penis" has 178,000 results."I have a ten inch penis" has 31,300 results."I have a 10 inch penis" has 136,000 results.

I think Randall used the numeral for some and actually typed out the words for others, although I'm not sure. He should've stuck with Google searches without numbers because of this little area-for-interpretation thingy.

But then Randall is just plain wrong:

"There are 4 lights" - 20,900"There are four lights" - 2,200,000

According to the graph, "There are lights" were x=4, there are about one million results. (It's around about a million. (Definitely not two million and definitely not 21,000.)

Randall just plain fucked up.

and if the Cambridge Women's Pornography Cooperative doesn't sound like an anarcha-feminist collective, i don't know what does.

I feel sort of bad for Mr. Munroe, now. I'm sure he wrote this comic all, "Stickin' up for the ladies! All right!" but really, WE WOMEN DON'T NEED MUNROE TO STICK UP FOR US! WE BE DOIN IT OURSELVES.

but I can't see many of them thinking porn is awesome, because it promotes viewing women as objects instead of people.

Well, there are all types of porn, no? I mean, gay male porn clearly doesn't promote viewing women as objects. I think most modern feminists realize that (a) sex is sexy, (b) most porn is really exploitative, (c) some porn isn't.

@"sex dice" again:I just checked the penis graph and I have got to say..YOU STUPID STUPID FUCK!All the numbers are correct and he used numerals throughout the whole thing! God, you're such a moron!!Please don't try to be a smart-ass ever again because you clearly lack the necessary intelligence

@Anonymous who likes to swear and offend "sex dice":Yes, if you don't put quotes around the sentence then it might be approximately right, I'm not sure as I seem to get a different number of results than everybody else (maybe because I don't use the English version of google).However, WITHOUT QUOTES is USELESS.I mean, even on the first page on google I get a post saying "Get a 9 Inch Penis". That is definitely NOT the sentence "I have a 9 inch penis".

OH MY FUCKING GOD! Another fucking stupid person.. FUCK!Please get your facts straight.1. Use the english version dude!2. The numbers are right WITH FUCKING QUOTES AROUND THE FUCKING SHIT!3. As already stated in an earlier post: Don't try to be a smart-ass if you're not intelligent enough.

Examples:"i have a 9-inch penis" gives me 180k results - just what the graph says."i have an 11-inch penis" gives me 55,600 results - just what the graph says....and so FUCKING on!

So please, SHUT THE FUCK UP and go play with your moronic buddy 'sex dice'.And grow a brain yourself you dumbass.

Google gives different numbers of results for different people? I didn't know that; I knew the order of the results changed sometimes.

Anyway, anon with a grudge against sex dice, please explain what I'm doing wrong with the b/c/d cup search. Without quotes, I get B=381K/C=638K/D=27.8M (with lots of irrelevant results), with quotes I get 13K/8K/2.6K, neither of which matches the trough Randy's got for C cups.

For the 99 problems graph, I get 0 results (using quotes) for 93 problems, 1 for 92 and 3 for 94. Where does Randy's minor peak at 93 come from?

Also, for somebody who blogs about science and math his graphs are inexcusably sloppy. Why does the trend line run through the outlying 8 glasses of water? If there's some justification for that, then why isn't the outlying 18 year old without a boyfriend/9 inch penis included in the trend line. Labeling on the # boyfriends/girlfriends graph sucks ass. The line that appears to be boyfriends on the left side of the graph turns into girlfriends on the right side of the graph. I'm pretty darn skeptical about the trend line on the IQ graph; probably he pulled it out of his ass. And a minor quibble, searching for "I'm in junior grade" only gets 3 results. I realize he probably searched for "I'm a junior", but he could've made it clearer.

Basically, he's done plenty of google results comics before; the idea is tired, his graphs are embarassingly sloppy for anybody who is into science/math, and the numbers shown aren't even the true number of results Google gives. This is a strong contender for worst xkcd ever.

It's not only to prove I'm right, but to prove that the other guys are WRONG! ;)

Sepia:You have got to be fucking kidding me, right? It is statistically almost impossible that so many stupid morons accumulate on one fucking blog!I'm watching tv right now so I just checked the cup size thing for now. I seriously don't know what you are doing wrong, but somehow YOU ARE FUCKING WRONG!Come on guys, it can't be THAT hard..Go to google.com (the ENGLISH one) and get your fucking search term right. I did that and here are my results:"i'm an a-cup" -> 431,000"i'm a b-cup" -> 54,900"i'm a c-cup" -> 3,540"i'm a d-cup" -> 50,600"i'm an e-cup" -> 105,000"i'm an f-cup" -> 37,400"i'm a g-cup" -> 7,160AND THEY ARE ALL ACCORDING TO THE GRAPH!D-cup and F-cup are drawn pretty sloppy and are therefore not correct in relation to one another, but that's about everything that's wrong here.About the other graphs: Maybe later, tv is more important right now.

Anonymous: Uhm.. yeah.. or maybe YOU are doing something wrong. Idiot. Show us your search terms and results or shut up.

Sepia:Halftime break, so on to your next problem:"i got 93 problems" gets me 3 results. So once again: You are doing something wrong or google does not like you.I get:92 -> 4 results93 -> 3 results94 -> 3 resultsYes there is some minor peak in the graph that isn't in the data, but Randall is by far no perfectionist when it comes to drawing. We all know that. So what?

It occurs to me that it's possible Randall wasn't even AIMING for accuracy in his graphs; maybe he fudged the data to imply certain conclusions. Like, "Oh, so many poor, lonely, quirky, 18 year old nerd girls w/ C-cups; don't despair! There's a legion of socially-maladjusted creeps on the xkcd forums that would be DELIGHTED to date you (while misrepresenting their IQs and penis sizes)".

Also, yes, I agree, the drawings are terrible. I mean, c'mon Randall; just use some damn graph paper! You did it in the early comics (altho not for actual GRAPHS, if I remember correctly).

Yeah, these are some terribly-drawn graphs. What's especially bad is, as somebody else pointed out, the 147 being pretty far away from where it should be on the final graph. Normally, that would be a small detail, but the fact is that when there are only a few points on the graph that are labeled, they should be labeled correctly. And actually, taking a closer look, 100, 133, and 142 are also pretty far off as well, although 147 is the only one that isn't between its two closest tens (140 and 150), being more at the 152 position.

"You realise the fact that Porn for Women is a joke has no baring on the fact it perpetuates sexist stereotypes...? It has no baring on whether you can criticise it for employing and perpetuating those stereotypes... Considering that it doesn't have a baring on those things... the assertion that Randall doesn't realise that Porn for Women is supposed to be funny is pretty baseless."

Bearing. Bearing. For the love of God, learn to differentiate between homonyms before you use them a thousand times.

Anon 2:45 and 2:57 pretty much summed it up for me. As I said, it's more making fun of the fact that men don't help out their wives much rather than "Women only think about housework." In fact, there's another one of those books I hear called "Porn for Brides" with pictures of a guy helping out with wedding planning, making invitations, and so on. Again, the joke is "Men are really lazy and don't help plan weddings." Unless you're insinuating all married women's lives revolve around their wedding? That would be a bit silly.

@ Sarah

I mean, gay male porn clearly doesn't promote viewing women as objects. I think most modern feminists realize that (a) sex is sexy, (b) most porn is really exploitative, (c) some porn isn't.

Well again, it depends on the specific type of feminism, there's a lot of them out there. I've been to one extremely militant feminist blog that said things like every time a woman has sex, even if it's consensual, it's subjugation of women and therefore wrong. Obviously they'd rage against porn, but like I said, they're the extreme.

I think someone actually asked them specifically about gay porn and if it was okay since there were no women. I can't remember the response the blogger gave though.

Either way, outside of gay porn, I think you'd be hard-pressed to argue that there's porn out there that doesn't objectify women. I mean, that is kind of the point of porn, to reduce people to wanking material.

'Nate: "Women's lives revolve around housework" is exactly the same level of stereotype as "black people love fried chicken" or "Jews are tight with money". Prove to me how it's a harmless stereotype.'

Plz to note that Porn for Women was created by a woman to amuse other women. Your argument is primarily with the ladies who you think should stop laughing at it for their own good.

Also if you told off a Jew for making a stingy-Jew joke I'd think you were a jerk and should lighten up. Similarly for the fried chicken thing, although that's the first I've heard of that stereotype, so can't really comment.

One observation I haven't seen come up yet (which means it's either just me or it's so trivial compared to the other flaws that no one else bothered) is that the comic doesn't come across as having a female voice. If you showed me the punchline or alt-text without context and ask me to guess whether it was written by a man or a woman, I would pick a man without hesitation. Just one more way this comic fails to deliver its message, I guess.

perhaps it is because Randall is a lousy writer. That said, I'd be curious whether, given jus the text of this, someone thought it was written by a man or woman. Of course it is said by a female character (this is clear from the words themselves) but not a female author. I wonder.

This one week I got extremely bored and joined a dating site with various accounts in different locations and of different genders, and then varied my attempts (or lack thereof) to emulate the styles of speech. Or text, I suppose.One guy noticed that a supposed English chick was American (which he wasn't supposed to - also, Canadian, asshole), but failed that she was a he (which he was supposed to). Maybe I'm just really, really bad at sounding like a Brit, but he continued to believe I was being facetious when I said something to the effect of "nah, what you're really noticing is that I'm a dude. You see, men and women have slight differences in their speech centers etc etc."And all of this leaves me with one question - if you're still reading this comment, why?

To be fair, if you've not lived west of the Atlantic, all North American types sound more or less the same. I've lived in Canada for a year and I still can't always distinguish Canucks from Yanks (except the Quebecois and Arcadians, obviously).

Spelling-wise, there's a difference, altho the Queen's English is being pulled increasingly towards Yanqui perversions ("anathematize" rather than "anathematise", "sulfur" rather than "sulphur"). But it's more the use and choice of words - hard to define (except for obvious things, like use of fag, trunk, &c), but whenever I read British rather than north american blogs I notice the difference immediately. The difference is less once you compare journalists and academics, though.

Also, "aboot" comes from Scotland! And I hear it from Newfies all the time. My point about Quebecois & Arcadian was that the francophones are very obviously Not Americans. After that, one starts noticing the smaller differences, like anglophone Canadians vs. Americans, or the Scottish tinge that marks out Newfoundlanders.

What the hell is this?

Welcome. This is a website called XKCD SUCKS which is about the webcomic xkcd and why we think it sucks. My name is Carl and I used to write about it all the time, then I stopped because I went insane, and now other people write about it all the time. I forget their names. The posts still seem to be coming regularly, but many of the structural elements - like all the stuff in this lefthand pane - are a bit outdated. What can I say? Insane, etc.

I started this site because it had been clear to me for a while that xkcd is no longer a great webcomic (though it once was). Alas, many of its fans are too caught up in the faux-nerd culture that xkcd is a part of, and can't bring themselves to admit that the comic, at this point, is terrible. While I still like a new comic on occasion, I feel that more and more of them need the Iron Finger of Mockery knowingly pointed at them. This used to be called "XKCD: Overrated", but then it fell from just being overrated to being just horrible. Thus, xkcd sucks.

Here is a comic about me that Ann made. It is my favorite thing in the world.

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